“Miss—­Edgarton!” he plunged at last quite precipitately.  “Miss Edgarton!  Do I seem to have—­any shirt on?”

“No, you don’t seem to, exactly, Mr. Barton,” conceded little Eve Edgarton.  “And your skin—­”

From head to foot Barton’s whole body strained and twisted in a futile effort to raise himself to at least one elbow.  “Why, I’m stripped to my waist!” he stammered in real horror.

“Why, yes—­of course,” drawled little Eve Edgarton.  “And your skin—­” Imperturbably as she spoke she pushed him down flat on the ground again and began, with her hands edged vertically like two slim boards, to slash little blissful gashes of consciousness and pain into his frigid right arm.  “You see—­I had to take both your shirts,” she explained, “and what was left of your coat—­and all of my coat—­to make a soft, strong rope to tie round under your arms so the horse could drag you.”

“Did the roan drag me—­’way up here?” groaned Barton a bit hazily.

With the faintest possible gasp of surprise little Eve Edgarton stopped slashing his arm and, picking up the lantern, flashed it disconcertingly across his blinking eyes and naked shoulders.  “The roans are in heaven,” she said quite simply.  “It was Mother’s horse that dragged you up here.”  As casually as if he had been a big doll she reached out one slim brown finger and drew his under lip a little bit down from his teeth.  “My!  But you’re still blue!” she confided frankly.  “I guess perhaps you’d better have a little more vodka.”

Again Barton struggled vainly to raise himself on one elbow.  “Vodka?” he stammered.

Again the lifted lantern light flashed disconcertingly across his face and shoulders.  “Why, don’t you remember—­anything?” drawled little Eve Edgarton.  “Not anything at all?  Why, I must have worked over you two hours—­artificial respiration, you know, and all that sort of thing—­before I even got you up here!  My!  But you’re heavy!” she reproached him frowningly.  “Men ought to stay just as light as they possibly can, so when they get into trouble and things—­it would be easier for women to help them.  Why, last year in the China Sea—­with Father and five of his friends—!”

A trifle shiveringly she shrugged her shoulders.  “Oh, well, never mind about Father and the China Sea,” she retracted soberly.  “It’s only that I’m so small, you see, and so flexible—­I can crawl ’round most anywhere through port-holes and things—­even if they’re capsized.  So we only lost one of them—­one of Father’s friends, I mean; and I never would have lost him if he hadn’t been so heavy.”

“Hours?” gasped Barton irrelevantly.  With a wry twist of his neck he peered out through the darkness to where the freshening air, the steady, monotonous slosh-slosh-slosh of rain, the pale intermittent flare of stale lightning, proclaimed the opening of the cave.

“For Heaven’s sake, wh-at—­what time is it?” he faltered.